New tools to prepare materials data for simulation, enhanced integration with CAE

Cambridge, UK – November 25, 2015. Granta Design today announced GRANTA MI:Simulation™, a new software package that delivers accurate materials data for simulation. Simulation is increasingly important in product development, enabling a deeper understanding of product performance, reducing reliance on expensive physical prototyping, and saving time in design. But simulation accuracy depends on the quality of the input data, particularly the models used to describe the physical properties of materials. GRANTA MI:Simulation ensures accurate, fully-traceable, derivation of these models, helps simulation analysts to find and use the right materials data, and enables organizations to guarantee consistency and maximize returns from their investment in simulation.

The new package is based on GRANTA MI™, the leading materials information management system. Developing validated material models for simulation requires analysis of significant volumes of test data to ensure accurate description of the material across the range of relevant conditions. The first step to ensure accurate simulations is to capture and manage all of this complex data. This is a core capability of GRANTA MI, proven in use by leading global enterprises in sectors such as Aerospace, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, and Medical Devices.

The MI:Simulation package adds new tools to analyze this data and prepare the resulting models for Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). GRANTA MI:Data Analysis Apps will support key tasks, such as curve smoothing, averaging, and model fitting. These tasks usually need to be tailored to a user company’s specific properties and material types of interest, and to their in-house or preferred analysis methods and models. A sample App is provided to extract tensile test data from a corporate database, process it, and make the resulting models available for simulation. But, more important, are accompanying tools to create your own Apps, or to enable their creation by Granta’s Services Team. The result will enable engineers to derive exactly the simulation input data required by their company, quickly, traceably, and consistently.

The final step is to make this vital data available to the simulation analysts that need it. The GRANTA MI:Materials Gateway™ software enables access from directly within CAE environments including Abaqus/CAE®, ANSYS Workbench®, HyperMesh®, and NX®. The MI:Simulation package includes the user’s choice of MI:Materials Gateway, now enhanced to further smooth the workflow of finding and assigning relevant CAE models. For other systems, integration is still fast and error-free—users can export materials cards from GRANTA MI, with automatic data transforms and manipulation into the formats read by software such as LS-DYNA®, Nastran®, PAM-CRASH®, PAM-STAMP®, Patran®, and RADIOSS®.

These new capabilities will be available with the GRANTA MI Version 9 software release, due next month. But they are demonstrated for the first time at Granta web seminars this week.

“GRANTA MI is already widely used to manage the full lifecycle for materials data, from test to simulation model,” says Dr Patrick Coulter, Chief Operating Officer at Granta Design. “This new package smooths key analysis steps and enhances our solution for delivering data to CAE, fast and error-free. Enabling effective, reliable simulation is a key motivator for our customers, and we’re pleased to respond to their requirements.”